Hacker News Reader

Seconded! As an add-on to just navigating things, my native language is German, and when I first learned to read Cyrillic I was extremely surprised to realize how many words in Russian are similar to German. It's not like you get reading comprehension "for free", but I understand more than I would have expected given the totally different alphabet.

View on HN

I taught myself the Russian variant of Cyrillic when I was in college after I had finished my Spanish courses, and I found that the other variants aren't that difficult to pick up. One thing I noticed was there are a lot of English cognates as well. Then again, borrowings happen in both directions. I'm pretty sure the English word "hooey" has a Slavic origin. :)

I never would have properly guessed the pronunciation of the Serbian city of Subotica had I not seen the name rendered in Cyrillic: Суботица. "C" in South Slavic Latin script has no relation to "C" in English.

Congrats on picking up the most useless skill ever. I did the same but it was forced upon me by the (cough). Anyway, congrats again. We are so lucky.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com